The Living Dead
by Virodeil
Summary: *Caught Is Caught Is Cuddled Series* – After Thor's botched coronation ceremony, he and his closest confidants went to Jötunheim to seek answers and reparations on the sabotage that had caused it. There, they instead – accidentally – sabotaged an equally important ceremony. And the star – or rather, the flower – of the ceremony was… Loki?


The Living Dead  
By Rey

After Thor's botched coronation ceremony, he and his closest confidants went to Jötunheim to seek answers and reparations on the sabotage that had caused it. There, they instead – accidentally – sabotaged an equally important ceremony. And the star – or rather, the flower – of the ceremony was… Loki?

Started on: 31st October 2019 at 08:58 PM

Finished on: 3rd January 2020 at 11:59 PM

"Where are they?" Sif wondered aloud, audibly unnerved, when the party of six Asgardians arrived at what might be the ruins of Jötunheim's main palace, after trekking for so long and arduously. Nobody could really fault her for being so disquieted, though, for the ruins were totally empty of _any_ kind of living beings.

`_Are they all dead?_` Loki wondered privately, himself, with equal apprehension. `_Are they elsewhere? Hiding, perhaps? The Bifrost does have a pretty noticeable flare of energy. And when it last flared out here, their people and their realm were decimated…._`

He looked round, meanwhile; not only with his eyes, which strained against the gloom and alien environment, but also with his seiðr, which was… misbehaving. It was all that he could do to keep the use of his innate power from flaring out uncontrollably, from announcing himself in so bold and blatant a manner.

And then, the tentative tendral of seiðr that he had just extended to sweep the vicinity got tugged… somewhere.

Somewhere to his right, which displayed just a cracked archway bracketed by ruined walls and lack of ceiling. And there was still _nothing_ else than that, even there: no hint of warding, no spark of living organism, no touch of illusion, and of course no visual cues.

But he had not forgotten the old seiðrworking expression that said, "Beware of doors, for they lead somewhere."

In passing and for the laypeople, this expression would be nonsensical, redundant, even ludicrous. Nevertheless, it was a wise lesson in caution for seiðrworking folks. Because doors did lead to places… places that one might not have expected _at all_; and might not come back from the same way, even.

"What did you find there, brother? Did they put tricks on that archway?" Thor rumbled, then, sidling up to him and peering distrustfully, irritatedly at the same point in the ruins, after scoffing aloud at the lack of courage of the jötnar to show themselves.

`_Ha. Tricks. We would wish it were just 'tricks', if we were unlucky enough,_` Loki muttered glumly to himself. Aloud, he denied having found anything, then ushered his elder brother the Crown Prince away.

Well, he _tried_ to, in truth. Few people could deter Thor physically, _individually_, when Thor was purposely doing something, and Loki was not among such number. So when he took hold of Thor's cape, the cape's owner just batted his hand away and strode confidently _under and across the archway_.

"Oh, damn," he muttered, and hurried through, himself. Better dead or imprisoned than facing their wrathful parents' punishment _plus_ some mob linching for losing Asgard's Crown Prince, he thought.

All his gloomy predictions went into a stuttering stop, in any case, when he at last completed the seemingly short, meaningless trip across the invisible, intangible divide of the doorway. And it was not because _this_ doorway proved to be just like what the old seiðrworking expression had warned about, at that.

Seiðr was thick in the air, coating everything in the massive, softly lit, airy cavern the party had ended up in liberally with itself. It faintly spoke of new lives being greeted. But it also spoke about new lives cut short being mourned, and the latter slowly but surely snuffed out the former in a rising wave of grief.

Loki's breath hitched, but his was not the only one.

We should not be here," Volstagg whispered, almost inaudibly.

Before them, in the underground lake whose water reflected the silvery ambient light from above in sheets and twinkling flashes, scores and scores of huge but skinny figures gathered, solemnly facing the same direction as where the intruders were looking, silent as the water. None of the figures looked behind them, although Thor had just crunched his way across the pebbly shore towards the water, towards the gathering of _grieving jötnar_… which was a disquieting concept on its own for Loki.

The second prince of Asgard agreed whole-heartedly with Volstagg. But since when could "should" make a difference in Thor's opinion, except when it was a proposal to do battle, go adventuring, and the like?

"We shall return at another time," he said anyway, just as quietly as Volstagg had. "In the meantime, please distract my brother? I shall gather us some information, to further convince him to forgo confronting the frost giants for now. Look, the cliff yonder? I shall position myself on top of it, close to where they are looking, but invisible, to better see what is happening without being discovered."

And he did just that, once Volstagg and the other three warriors had acknowledged him – with varying amounts of reluctance – and trudged after Thor. Slipping away invisibly from the other Asgardians, he skirted the lake towards the cliff formation that he had pointed out, which indeed stood close to the "front" of the strange, silent and solemn gathering of frost giants; right at the edge of the water, at that. It felt like swimming through a thick, semi-permeable thing, oddly, now that he was invisible, and he itched to analyse _why_, but the heavy air of mourning and… tearful reminiscence?… tamped it down, for now. Besides, he had a mission to conduct. If he tarried too long, Thor would have made a racket; and, brutish beasts though these creatures were, mourning was to be respected, for any species.

He swiftly climbed up to the highest, sturdiest point on the cliff-top, egged on by the horrible, distasteful thought of having to smooth over even more Thor-related transgressions. He had yet to find a way to explain to his father _and mother_ why he had not managed to rein in Thor's desire to go to Jötunheim, as it was!

Thoughts of Thor, possible royal displeasure and punishments, and even those of why his seiðr had been behaving oddly, faded away unnoticed once the invisible spectator looked round from his vantage point.

The cavern was positively _gargantuan_, and the underground lake that it sheltered, likewise. From above, Loki could see that there were various uneven tiers on the brown and green and black and creamy lakebed, and the clear, clear water that filled it was _not_ frozen, even slightly. A couple of slowly flowing rivers drained into it, and it in turn drained out through smaller streams afar that led downwards, further into the earth. The view was… beautiful, peaceful. It even invoked a feeling of _safety_, however ludicrous it was to feel safe in the harsh realm of monsters.

And the monsters themselves, unbelievably, fit in with the ambience. They occupied various spots somewhat near the lake's edge, spanning out along the tiers on the lakebed in seemingly random groups, as if additional decorations to the lake. They bobbed and shifted with the gentle currents and wavelets rippling in the water: black and white and blue and greenish blue and greyish blue and pinpricks of glowing red, against the silver-tinged crystalline background that makes the lakebed glow nearly as much as the cavern's ceiling.

Loki found himself having been mesmerised, as if spellbound, only when the silent, solemn crowd stirred a little. He bestirred himself and wrenched his gaze from the tableau to look round the lake properly, like a scout _should_, chastising himself all the while. He _should not_ admire the _frost giants_ in _any_ way!

And then, his gazed was hooked, _again_, this time by a spread of… _things_… bobbing along the currents and wavelets where the crowd had been looking. The items range from a sprig of needle-like leaves, to toys, to odd bits of sparkling… stone? Crystal? Glass?… to pieces of fur.

And to a couple of flowers – one small, close-petalled, ball-like bright red and the other large, with huge sweeping petals like overlapping wings, translucently white with soft blue veins – slowly, carefully added by one of the frost giants who has just broken away from the crowd.

`_Since when does Jötunheim have any __**flowers**__ to speak of?_` Loki wondered, despite himself. He itched to touch them; to _steal_ them, even, for his mother. But what looked _and felt_ like a mourning ceremony was beginning right then, and he had no heart to disrupt it despite its jötun nature.

The frost giants, one by one or by a group of similarly marked, proceeded to pass by the line of bits-and-bobs, touching a specific item or items while doing so, under a continuous choir strain of a haunting wordless song. The scene, accompanied by the music, makes Loki's heart and eyes squeeze tight and burn, involuntarily.

And then, when the others had returned to their places, more or less, the lone frost giant from before, the flower bringer, took its turn, walking – or maybe swimming, paddling – towards the line of disparate items. It abruptly halted half-way to the peculiar altar, however, as though an invisible wall had suddenly stood there and barred it from proceeding on its path.

The heart-twinging, tear-wringing etherial choir, amplified by the cavern, slowly petered out in the wake of the frost giant's sudden stop. The air grew _heavier_, if it were at all possible, thick with morbid understanding, empathy, shared grief of offspring murdered so young, and shared mourning of a good family line ended.

Loki had no idea how he could glean such impressions from _the feelings in the air_ alone, but they indeed pushed against his psyche, stamping themselves on the surface of his thoughts, and he could not "look away" from them even if he would like to do so.

And then, as a few of the other frost giants gathered close round the lone one, a single voice broke the silence into pieces. It rose keenly, not only in grief but also in helpless rage at the fate it had been dealt, horror at remembering an agonising birth undergone twice just for the babies to be wrenched away, and pain of holding on to a shattered denial that the children had been dead for a long time already.

Loki was aware that he was sobbing only when similar sounds rose from below, choking the atmosphere further.

The song of a mother bereft then lilted to a deep ache embedded in the remembrance of naming the precious, precious children after the equally precious flowers that were so rare in the harsh realm, and Loki's eyes were drawn to the flowers that he had coveted.

The large translucent one was so beautiful, and the small red one was so fierce.

The children – girls? – were lucky to have been named so.

They were lucky to have been _loved_ so, even in absentia, even in vain.

`_Maybe, I could touch one of the flowers and send the Norns my wish? The wish could ride on the charged emotions here. As childish as this sounds…._`

He found himself slipping down the cliff and into the water before his mind was even half-way to acknowledging the – quite childish, quite dangerous, quite disrespectful – idea as an actionable decision.

The water was strangely… _warm_. But it soon crept up into a boiling temperature that nonetheless affect nothing of its physical nature, as though Loki had dipped into an acid tub. It burnt away layers of foreign enchantments and wards from him, partly what he had put there himself and partly… not.

`_Who put these on me? They feel so old,_` he thought, even as he involuntarily dipped beneath the surface and thrashed about in pain, for seemingly a moment and an age.

And then, he was free, and light, so free and so light as though he were air itself, unencumbered by anything but his own soul and mind and body.

`_Is this a seiðr-cleansing pool?_` he wondered, even as he swam along the cliff-lined shore towards the line of… offerings? Mementos of dead children?… once he was slightly recovered. `_It would make sense, with such protection as that door. But why conduct a mourning ceremony here?_` His thoughts ran, and ran, and ran, deliberately, a defence mechanism against the raw emotions pouring all round him.

And still, his eyes burnt, and so did his heart.

Touching one of the huge, sweeping petals of the translucent flower at last, from below, was a link to reality that rudely yanked the conflicted, almost befuddled second prince of Asgard away from his desperately looping train of thoughts.

`_So soft,_` he wondered, surprised. `_Thick, but silky, flowing…. Mother would love this. The child would love this, to be named so, if she were alive, frost giant though she would be._`

He traced the blue veins running along the outside of the petals, and only then did he realise that he had _changed colours_. His arm was that of a frost giant's now, blue and silver-marked. And when he looked down, he found that _his whole body_ was likewise. Detaching his fingers from the flower gave him the same result, but he was strangely loathed to return to the cliff to see if he would return to normal away from the water.

`_Did the water give me this? But I feel so free of __**all**__ outside influence, presently,_` he wondered, starting to panic.

Before he could do anything but huddling behind and somewhat beneath the translucent flower, however, he noticed that the cavern had once more fallen silent, but this time a watchful silence that was slowly but surely rising into anger – nay, _fury_.

`_Oh, no. They have noticed me! I must have rocked the flower a little too much. This is a sacred site for them. I am intruding in a sacred ceremony. Oh, no, no, no, no. To think that I thought so lowly of Thor! Now I am doing __**worse**__ than he did! And the frost giants are reputedly brutal when angered! With me being alone and a frost giant in Asgardian clothes like this…._`

He clutched at the petal he was hiding behind.

A little too forcefully.

It crunched.

So loud to his ears. So loud in the silence.

The water churned, then, so abruptly that Loki could do nothing but try to stay afloat, holding to the flower petal as though to a boat's lifeline.

And then _both_ he and the flowers were yanked out of the water, up so high, _by a frost giant_.

But the frost giant was… not… angry?

Loki looked into large, glowing red eyes, and fell into a maelstrom of feelings not of his own that mingled grief and fury with shock, wonder and… joy?

"Loptr," the frost giant whispered, then, and now Loki could hear the bubbling, churning emotions there, _clearly_.

"Loptr. Loptr. Loptr," it repeated, with wonder and poignant joy pushing aside the grief and fury more and more in each iteration.

And then, as Loki was pressed at one side against the frost giant's front, encircled in one of its tree-trunk-sized arms, with his hands still clutching a bit of the now-dangling flower, a huge hand, tipped with black nails, descended on his heaving chest.

"Loptr," it spoke, lowly, firmly, _reverently_, just as the palm of the huge hand connected with somehow bare skin, sending forth a pulse of _very, very familiar_ seiðr.

The action itself was… familiar, dragged to the fore of Loki's mind from far, far away in the past, accompanying a feeling of home, of safety, of kin.

He felt numb.

"Loptr. My child. My child is _alive_. My Loptr. Loé, Loé, Amma is here," the frost giant declared, then, fervently, just for the both of them, but Loki did not react. _Could not_.

He knew. Somehow, he _knew_, and he could not deny what he had known. Not this time. Not when a _very familiar_ seiðr travelled through his whole being; not of his own, but somehow not as intrusive as it _should_ be.

He knew, and he felt numb.


End file.
